Bleiben in der Fremde: Artistic responses to the 'guest worker' system of Western Europe

The title of Semra Ertan's 1981 German poem frames it as an audacious lament in a way the English translation cannot entirely accommodate. ‘Mein Name is Ausländer / My name is foreigner.’ If you happen to know even a modicum of German, you will deduce that ‘Ausländer’ suggests someone outside of a defined territory, someone from the outside, someone who therefore has limited right to claim belonging. Foreigner sounds more exotic and even neutral, as if it refuses to bear the discriminatory undertone that is embedded within the German original. It suffices to communicate Ertan’s intention, that being addressed as someone who isn’t ‘from’ a place, who doesn’t belong, is imposed upon a person’s identity to the point where it becomes their identity and positions their status in a specific society. In Ertan’s instance, it is a reference to German society and the poem is rooted in her identity as the child of Gastarbeiterin, a ‘guest worker’ program initiated between West Germany and Turkey. Born in 1957 in Mersin, Turkey, at the age of 14 or 15, Ertan moved to West Germany with her parents. The program, which was endorsed by Turkey as a way of enabling the flow of foreign currency, ended in 1973 with West Germany unsuccessfully introducing financial incentives for people to leave. By then, the migrants who had been invited to work became the targets of resentment and hostility. Coming from an Arabic-speaking Alevi minority, Ertan also experienced discrimination and exclusion in Turkey, which compounded her dilemma about belonging to no place.

Ertan worked as a political activist and wrote poems in German and Turkish, which remained unpublished during her lifetime, receiving awards posthumously. In 1982, at the age of 25, she set herself on fire in a final act of protest against rising xenophobia. Cana Bilir-Meier, her niece, and her family have been tirelessly maintaining her legacy, emblazoned in her powerful writing, hosting an annual vigil at St. Pauli, the site of her self-immolation in Hamburg.

Ever since I came across Ertan’s poem in Autumn 2022, I have wondered about how it came to her, how the words manifested themselves on paper. Did she write in Turkish then translate into German? Were the lines seamless? Did they arrive within her consciousness fully formed and continuous or at disparate moments to be collected and re-formed later? When I saw the press release for Gurbette Kalmak / Bleiben in der Fremde curated by Gürsoy Doğtaş and Nina Tabassomi at TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol in Innsbruck, Austria, recognition set in. Three names in particular: Cana Bilir-Meier, Semra Ertan and Nil Yalter. I was excited about how these names were familiar to me because of my work as an editor and proof reader. I knew I had to cross the Brenner into North Tyrol to see the show. Upon arrival, as I made my way past Hanefi Yeter’s haunting paintings, I entered a large room that was dedicated to Bilir-Meier’s video homage to Ertan and two large vitrines containing paraphernalia related to Ertan’s life and death, and the original drafts of the poem, Mein Name is Ausländer in Turkish and German. The poem is magnificent in its directness, in how it succinctly recounts the alienation of not being entitled to belong, of being reduced to a workforce, a nameless body whose existence must be confined to serving the interests of the German and Turkish economies. A worker with minimal rights, without the ability to demand better conditions, unable to demand accountability from anyone.

‘If you do not like the work,
Go back home,’ they say.
My work is hard,
My work is dirty,
My wage is low.
I also pay taxes, I say.
I say it again and again,
Whenever I have to hear:
‘Find yourself another job’.

…

But the fault is not with the Germans,
Is not with the Turks.
Turkey needs foreign currency,
Germany workers.
My country sold us to Germany,
Like stepchildren,
Like useless people.

The accompanying video by Bilir-Meier contains excerpts from another poem and archival footage in the form of photographs and newspaper clippings, revealing the depth of Ertan’s subjectivity and her ability to give form to emotions that were not hers alone, but experienced by so many like her who settled in Germany and were compelled to find ways of invisibilising their identities in the name of integration.

The exhibition, Bleiben in der Fremde is perfectly titled, in that it is an examination of artistic points of view that encapsulated the experiences of guest workers who were treated like third-class citizens, but upon whose backs contemporary Europe was built. With my limited German, I interpret the title as ‘Staying in the foreignness’, a kind of diktat that you are fated never to belong, neither quite an immigrant, neither quite a refugee. The show signifies this other space in which the legality of people’s existence is flippantly determined by the policy of nation-state and by which the doctrine of borders continues to be upheld. Nil Yalter reminds us of the intense emotional labour of such a figure through the poster series, Exile is Hard Work, which I relate to so much, and seeing the posters made me feel ‘seen’. Because the standards of integration that Europe applies to those who come from outside its borders are so astonishingly tedious. Citizenship is tied to language or birth and acquiring it through other means involves studied labour whose fruits can only be enjoyed by subsequent generations. The show reveals the labour of artists in allowing for all these stories and subjectivities that would have slipped through the cracks of written history. It does so through subtle gestures, allowing the works to breathe and reveal themselves. It doesn’t romanticise, rather it renders visible the reality of the existential struggles of people who were not allowed the luxury of belonging despite their hard work, people who were caught between countries and between local political scenarious. It gives face to the faceless who were subsumed under the category of guest worker and offers itself as a provocation to reconsider Europe’s present through the prism of its not-too-distant past, showing how ongoing right-wing rhetoric around Turkish migrant workers rights can be traced back to Europe’s fremdeln, fear of strangers.